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On Going to Church 



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By G. Bernard Shaw 

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ON GOING TO CHURCH 



FROM THE SAVOY 

an OEssag 

flDn <&oins to Ctmrcb 

BY 

G. BERNARD SHAW 



I 



BOSTON 

JOHN W. LUCE & CO. 

1905 



A QUARTERLY 
PUBLISHED IN LONDON, 1896 

EDITED BY 

ARTHUR SYMONS 

Author of 

"London N i ghts ," 

' A Memoir of Aubrey Beardsley" etc. 



>■* 



[I] 



jA S a modern man, concerned 
/jk with matters of fine art and 
JL jL. living in London by the 
sweat of my brain, I dwell in a 
world which, unable to live by 
bread alone, lives spiritually on al- 
cohol and morphia. Young and 
excessively sentimental people live 
on love, and delight in poetry or 
fine writing which declares that 
love is Alpha and Omega; but an 
attentive examination will gener- 
ally establish the fact that this kind 
of love, ethereal as it seems, is 
merely a symptom of the drugs I 



On Going to Church 

have mentioned, and does not occur 
independently except in those per- 
sons whose normal state is similar 
to that induced in healthy persons 
by narcotic stimulants. If from the 
fine art of to-day we set aside feel- 
ingless or prosaic art, which is, 
properly, not fine art at all, we may 
safely refer most of the rest to feel, 
ing produced by the teapot, the 
bottle, or the hypodermic syringe. 
An exhibition of the cleverest men 
and women in London at five p.m., 
with their afternoon tea cut off, 
would shatter many illusions. Tea 
and coffee and cigarettes produce 
conversation; lager beer and pipes 
produce routine journalism; wine 



On Going to Church 

and gallantry produce brilliant jour- 
nalism, essays and novels; brandy 
and cigars produce violently de- 
votional or erotic poetry; morphia 
produces tragic exaltation (useful on 
the stage) ; and sobriety produces 
an average curate's sermon. Again, 
strychnine and arsenic may be taken 
as pick-me-ups ; doctors quite un- 
derstand that "tonics" mean drams 
of ether ; chlorodyne is a universal 
medicine; chloral, sulphonal and 
the like call up Nature's great de- 
stroyer, artificial sleep ; bromide of 
potassium will reduce the over- 
sensitive man of genius to a con- 
dition in which the alighting of a 
wasp on his naked eyeball will not 

[3] ' 



On Going to Church 

make him wink; haschisch tempts 
the dreamer by the Oriental gla- 
mour of its reputation; and gin is 
a cheap substitute for all these ano- 
dynes. Most of the activity of the 
Press, the Pulpit, the Platform and 
the Theatre is only a symptom of 
the activity of the drug trade, the 
tea trade, the tobacco trade and the 
liquor trade. The world is not 
going from bad to worse, it is true ; 
but the increased facilities which 
constitute the advance of civilisa- 
tion include facilities for drugging 
oneself. These facilities wipe whole 
races of black men off the face of 
the earth; and every extension and 
refinement of them picks a stratum 

[4] 



On Going to Church 

out of white society and devotes it 
to destruction. Such traditions of 
the gross old habits as have reached 
me seem to be based on the idea 
of first doing your day's work and 
then enjoying yourself by getting 
drunk. Nowadays you get drunk 
to enable you to begin work. 
Shakespere's opportunities of med- 
dling with his nerves were much 
more limited than Dante Rossetti's ; 
but it is not clear that the advan- 
tage of the change lay with Ros- 
setti. Besides, though Shakespere 
may, as tradition asserts, have died 
of drink in a ditch, he at all events 
conceived alcohol as an enemy put 
by a man into his own mouth to 

[5] 



On Going to Church 

steal away his brains; whereas the 
modern man conceives it as an in- 
dispensable means of setting his 
brains going. We drink and drug, 
not for the pleasure of it, but for 
Dutch inspiration and by the advice 
of our doctors, as duellists drink 
for Dutch courage by the advice 
of their seconds. Obviously this 
systematic, utilitarian drugging 
and stimulating, though necessarily 
"moderate" (so as not to defeat its 
own object), is more dangerous than 
the old boozing if we are to regard 
the use of stimulants as an evil. 

As for me, I do not clearly see 
where a scientific line can be drawn 
between food and stimulants. I 
[6] 



On Going to Church 

cannot say, like Ninon de TEnclos, 
that a bowl of soup intoxicates me; 
but it stimulates me as much as I 
want to be stimulated, which is, 
perhaps, all that Ninon meant. 
Still, I have not failed to observe 
that all the drugs, from tea to mor- 
phia, and all the drams, from lager 
beer to brandy, dull the edge of self- 
criticism and make a man content 
with something less than the best 
work of which he is soberly capable. 
He thinks his work better, when he 
is really only more easily satisfied 
with himself. Those whose daily 
task is only a routine, for the suffi- 
cient discharge of which a man need 
hardly be more than half alive, may 

[7] 



On Going to Church 

seek this fool's paradise without 
detriment to their work; but to 
those professional men whose art 
affords practically boundless scope 
for skill of execution and elevation 
of thought, to take drug or dram 
is to sacrifice the keenest, most 
precious part of life to a dollop of 
lazy and vulgar comfort for which 
no true man of genius should have 
any greater stomach than the lady 
of the manor has for her plough- 
man's lump of fat bacon. To the 
creative artist stimulants are espe- 
cially dangerous, since they produce 
that terrible dream-glamour in 
which the ugly, the grotesque, the 
wicked, the morbific begin to fas- 
[8] 



On Going to Church 

cinate and obsess instead of disgust- 
ing. This effect, however faint it 
may be, is always produced in some 
degree by drugs. The mark left 
on a novel in the Leisure Hour by 
a cup of tea may be imperceptible 
to a bishop's wife who has just had 
two cups ; but the effect is there as 
certainly as if De Quincey's eight 
thousand drops of laudanum had 
been substituted. 

A very little experience of the 
world of art and letters will con- 
vince any open-minded person that 
abstinence, pure and simple, is not 
a practicable remedy for this state 
of things. There is a considerable 
commercial demand for maudlin or 

[9] 



On Going to Church 

nightmarish art and literature which 
no sober person would produce, the 
manufacture of which must accord- 
ingly be frankly classed industrially 
with the unhealthy trades, and mor- 
ally with the manufacture of un- 
wholesome sweets for children or 
the distilling of gin. What the 
victims of this industry call imagi- 
nation and artistic faculty is nothing 
but attenuated delirium tremens, 
like Pasteur's attenuated hydropho- 
bia. It is useless to encumber an 
argument with these predestined 
children of perdition. The only 
profitable cases are those to con- 
sider of people engaged in the 
healthy pursuit of those arts which 

[10] 



On Going to Church 

afford scope for the greatest mental 
and physical energy, the clearest 
and acutest reason and the most 
elevated perception. Work of this 
kind requires an intensity of energy 
of which no ordinary labourer or 
routine official can form any con- 
ception. If the dreams of Keeley- 
ism could be so far realised as to 
transmute human brain energy into 
vulgar explosive force, the head of 
Shakespere, used as a bombshell, 
might conceivably blow England 
out of the sea. At all events, the 
succession of efforts by which a 
Shaksperean play, a Beethoven sym- 
phony, or a Wagner music-drama 
is produced, though it may not 

[»] 



On Going to Church 

overtax Shakespere, Beethoven or 
Wagner, must certainly tax even 
them to the utmost, and would be 
as prodigiously impossible to the 
average professional man as the 
writing of an ordinary leading arti- 
cle to a ploughman. What is called 
professional work is, in point of 
severity, just what you choose to 
make it, either commonplace, easy 
and requiring only extensive indus- 
try to be lucrative, or else distin- 
guished, difficult and exacting the 
fiercest intensive industry in return, 
after a probation of twenty years or 
so, for authority, reputation and an 
income only sufficient for simple 
habits and plain living. The whole 

[12] 



On Going to Church 

professional world lies between 
these two extremes. At the one, 
you have the man to whom his 
profession is only a means of mak- 
ing himself and his family com- 
fortable and prosperous: at the 
other, you have the man who sac- 
rifices everything and everybody, 
himself included, to the perfection 
of his work — to the passion for 
efficiency which is the true master- 
passion of the artist. At the one, 
work is a necessary evil and money- 
making a pleasure: at the other, 
work is the objective realisation of 
life and moneymaking a nuisance. 
At the one, men drink and drug to 
make themselves comfortable: at 

[13] 



On Going to Church 

the other, to stimulate their work- 
ing faculty. Preach mere absti- 
nence at the one, and you are 
preaching nothing but diminution 
of happiness. Preach it at the 
other, and you are proposing a re- 
duction of efficiency. If you are 
to prevail, you must propose a sub- 
stitute. And the only one I have 
yet been able to hit on is — going 
to church. 

It will not be disputed, I pre- 
sume, that an unstimulated saint 
can work as hard, as long, as finely 
and, on occasion, as fiercely, as a 
stimulated sinner. Recuperation, 
recreation, inspiration seem to come 
to the saint far more surely than to 



On Going to Church 

the man who grows coarser and 
fatter with every additional hun- 
dred a year, and who calls the saint 
an ascetic. A comparison of the 
works of our carnivorous drunkard 
poets with those of Shelley, or of 
Dr. Johnson's dictionary with that 
of the vegetarian Littre, is sufficient 
to show that the secret of attaining 
the highest eminence either in 
poetry or in dictionary compiling 
(and all fine literature lies between 
the two), is to be found neither in 
alcohol nor in our monstrous habit 
of bringing millions of useless and 
disagreeable animals into existence 
for the express purpose of barba- 
rously slaughtering them, roasting 

[15] 



On Going to Church 

their corpses and eating them. I 
have myself tried the experiment 
of not eating meat or drinking tea, 
coffee or spirits for more than a 
dozen years past, without, as far as I 
can discover, placing myself at more 
than my natural disadvantages rel- 
atively to those colleagues of mine 
who patronise the slaughter-house 
and the distillery. But then I go 
to church. If you should chance 
to see, in a country churchyard, a 
bicycle leaning against a tombstone, 
you are not unlikely to find me in- 
side the church if it is old enough 
or new enough to be fit for its pur- 
pose. There I find rest without 
languor ar\d recreation without ex- 
[16] 



On Going to Church 

citement, both of a quality un- 
known to the traveller who turns 
from the village church to the vil- 
lage inn and seeks to renew him- 
self with shandygaff. Any place 
where men dwell, village or city, 
is a reflection of the consciousness 
of every single man. In my con- 
sciousness, there is a market, a gar- 
den, a dwelling, a workshop, a 
lover's walk — above all, a cathe- 
dral. My appeal to the master- 
builder is : Mirror this cathedral 
for me in enduring stone ; make it 
with hands ; let it direct its sure 
and clear appeal to my senses, so 
that when my spirit is vaguely 
groping after an elusive mood my 

[17] 



On Going to Church 

eye shall be caught by the skyward 
tower, showing me where, within 
the cathedral, I may find my way 
to the cathedral within me. With 
a right knowledge of this great 
function of the cathedral builder, 
and craft enough to set an arch on 
a couple of pillars, make doors and 
windows in a good wall and put a 
roof over them, any modern man 
might, it seems to me, build 
churches as they built them in the 
middle ages, if only the pious 
founders and the parson would let 
him. For want of that knowledge, 
gentlemen of Mr. Pecksniff's pro- 
fession make fashionable pencil- 
drawings, presenting what Mr. 
[18] 



On Going to Church 

Pecksniff's creator elsewhere calls 
an architectooralooral appearance, 
with which, having delighted the 
darkened eyes of the committee 
and the clerics, they have them 
translated into bricks and masonry 
and take a shilling in the pound on 
the bill, with the result that the 
bishop may consecrate the finished 
building until he is black in the 
face without making a real church 
of it. Can it be doubted by the 
pious that babies baptised in such 
places go to limbo if they die be- 
fore qualifying themselves for other 
regions ; that prayers said there do 
not count ; nay, that such purpose- 
less, respectable-looking interiors 

[19] 



On Going to Church 

are irreconcilable with the doctrine 
of Omnipresence, since the bishop's 
blessing is no spell of black magic 
to imprison Omnipotence in a place 
that must needs be intolerable to 
Omniscience ? At all events, the 
godhead in me, certified by the 
tenth chapter of St. John's Gospel 
to those who will admit no other 
authority, refuses to enter these 
barren places. This is perhaps for- 
tunate, since they are generally kept 
locked ; and even when they are 
open, they are jealously guarded in 
the spirit of that Westminster, Ab- 
bey verger who, not along ago, had 
a stranger arrested for kneeling 
down, and explained, when remon- 

[20] 



On Going to Church 

strated with, that if that sort of 
thing were tolerated, they would 
soon have people praying all over 
the place. Happily it is not so 
everywhere. You may now ride 
or tramp into a village with a fair 
chance of finding the church-door 
open and a manuscript placard in 
the porch, whereby the parson, 
speaking no less as a man and a 
brother than as the porter of the 
House Beautiful, gives you to un- 
derstand that the church is open 
always for those who have any use 
for it. Inside such churches you 
will often find not only carefully- 
cherished work from the ages of 
faith, which you expect to find noble 

[21] 



On Going to Church 

and lovely, but sometimes a quite 
modern furnishing of the interior 
and draping of the altar, evidently 
done, not by contract with a firm 
celebrated for its illustrated cata- 
logues, but by someone who loved 
and understood the church, and 
who, when baffled in the search for 
beautiful things, had at least suc- 
ceeded in avoiding indecently com- 
mercial and incongruous ones. And 
then the search for beauty is not 
always baffled. When the dean 
and chapter of a cathedral want 
not merely an ugly but a positively 
beastly pulpit to preach from — 
something like the Albert Memo- 
rial canopy, only much worse — 

[22] 



On Going to Church 

they always get it, improbable and 
unnatural as the enterprise is. Sim- 
ilarly, when an enlightened country 
parson wants an unpretending tub 
to thump, with a few pretty panels 
in it and a pleasant shape generally, 
he will, with a little perseverance, 
soon enough find a craftsman who 
has picked up the thread of the 
tradition of his craft from the time 
when that craft was a fine art — as 
may be done nowadays more easily 
than was possible before we had 
cheap trips and cheap photographs* 

*At the bookstall in the South Kensing- 
ton Museum, any young craftsman, or other 
person, can turn over hundreds of photo- 
graphs taken by Alinari, of Florence, from 
the finest work in the churches and palaces 

[23] 



On Going to Church 

— and who is only too glad to be 
allowed to try his hand at some- 
thing in the line of that tradition. 
Some months ago, bicycling in the 
west country, I came upon a little 
church, built long before the sense 
of beauty and devotion had been 

of Italy. He will not be importuned to 
buy, or grudged access to the portfolios 
which are, fortunately, in charge of a 
lady who is a first-rate public servant. 
He can, however, purchase as many of 
the photographs as he wants for sixpence 
each. This invaluable arrangement, having 
been made at the public expense, is 
carefully kept from the public knowledge, 
because, if it were properly advertised, 
complaints might be made by English 
shopkeepers who object to our buying Ali- 
nari's cheap photographs instead of their own 
dear photographs of the Great Wheel at 
Earl's Court. 

[24] 



On Going to Church 

supplanted by the sense of respecta- 
bility and talent, in which some 
neat panels left by a modern carver 
had been painted with a few saints 
on gold backgrounds, evidently by 
some woman who had tried to learn 
what she could from the early 
Florentine masters and had done 
the work in the true votive spirit, 
without any taint of the amateur 
exhibiting his irritating and futile 
imitations of the celebrated-artist 
business. From such humble but 
quite acceptable efforts, up to the 
masterpiece in stained glass by Wil- 
liam Morris and Burne-Jones which 
occasionally astonishes you in places 
far more remote and unlikely than 

[25] 



On Going to Church 

Birmingham or Oxford, convin- 
cing evidence may be picked up 
here and there that the decay of 
religious art from the sixteenth 
century to the nineteenth was not 
caused by any atrophy of the artis- 
tic faculty, but was an eclipse of 
religion by science and commerce. 
It is an odd period to look back 
on from the churchgoer's point 
of view — those eclipsed centuries 
calling their predecessors " the 
dark ages," and trying to prove 
their own piety by raising, at huge 
expense, gigantic monuments in 
enduring stone (not very enduring, 
though, sometimes) of their infi- 
delity. Go to Milan, and join the 

[26] 



On Going to Church 

rush of tourists to its petrified 
christening-cake of a cathedral. 
The projectors of that costly orna- 
ment spared no expense to prove 
that their devotion was ten times 
greater than that of the builders 
of San Ambrogio. But every 
pound they spent only recorded in 
marble that their devotion was a 
hundred times less. Go on to 
Florence and try San Lorenzo, a 
really noble church (which the 
Milan Cathedral is not), Brunel- 
leschi's masterpiece. You cannot 
but admire its intellectual com- 
mand of form, its unaffected 
dignity, its power and accomplish- 
ment, its masterly combination of 

[27] 



On Going to Church 

simplicity and homogeneity of 
plan with elegance and variety of 
detail : you are even touched by 
the retention of that part of the 
beauty of the older time which 
was perceptible to the Renascent 
intellect before its weaning from 
heavenly food had been followed 
by starvation. You understand 
the deep and serious respect which 
Michael Angelo had for Brunnel- 
leschi — why he said " I can do 
different work, but not better. " 
But a few minutes' walk to Santa 
Maria Novella or Santa Croce, or 
a turn in the steam-tram to San 
Miniato, will bring you to churches 
built a century or two earlier ; and 

[28] 



On Going to Church 

you have only to cross their thresh- 
olds to feel, almost before you 
have smelt the incense, the differ- 
ence between a church built to 
the pride and glory of God (not to 
mention the Medici) and one built 
as a sanctuary shielded by God's 
presence from pride and glory and 
all the other burdens of life. In 
San Lorenzo up goes your head — 
every isolating advantage you have 
of talent, power or rank asserts 
itself with thrilling poignancy. 
In the older churches you forget 
yourself, and are the equal of the 
beggar at the door, standing on 
ground made holy by that labour 
in which we have discovered the 

[29] 



On Going to Church 

reality of prayer. You may also 
hit on a church like the Santissima 
Annunziata, carefully and expen- 
sively brought up to date, quite in 
our modern church-restoring man- 
ner, by generations of princes 
chewing the cud of the Renas- 
cence ; and there you will see the 
worship of glory and the self-suffi- 
ciency of intellect giving way to 
the display of wealth and elegance 
as a guarantee of social importance 
— in another word, snobbery. In 
later edifices you see how intellect, 
finding its worshippers growing 
colder, had to abandon its dignity 
and cut capers to attract attention, 
giving the grotesque, the eccentric, 

[30] 



On Going to Church 

the baroque, even the profane and 
blasphemous, until, finally, it is 
thoroughly snubbed out of its vul- 
gar attempts at self-assertion, and 
mopes conventionally in our mod- 
ern churches of St. Nicholas With- 
out and St. Walker Within, locked 
up, except at service-time, from 
week's end to week's end without 
ever provoking the smallest protest 
from a public only too glad to 
have an excuse for not going into 
them. You may read the same 
history of the human soul in any 
art you like to select ; but he who 
runs may read it in the streets by 
looking at the churches. 

Now, consider for a moment the 

[31] 



On Going to Church 

prodigious increase of the popu- 
lation of Christendom since the 
church of San Zeno Maggiore was 
built at Verona, in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries. Let a man 
go and renew himself for half an 
hour occasionally in San Zeno, and 
he need eat no corpses, nor drink 
any drugs or drams to sustain him. 
Yet not even all Verona, much less 
all Europe, could resort to San 
Zeno in the thirteenth century; 
whereas, in the nineteenth, a thou- 
sand perfect churches would be 
but as a thousand drops of rain on 
Sahara. Yet in London, with four 
millions and a quarter of people in 
it, how many perfect or usable 

[32] 



On Going to Church 

churches are there? And of the 
few we have, how many are ap- 
parent to the wayfarer ? Who, for 
instance, would guess from the 
repulsive exterior of Westminster 
Abbey that there are beautiful 
chapels and a noble nave within, 
or cloisters without, on the hidden 
side ? 

I remember, a dozen years ago, 
Parson Shuttleworth, of St. Nicho- 
las Cole Abbey in the city, tried 
to persuade the city man to spend 
his mid-day hour of rest in church ; 
guaranteeing him immunity from 
sermons, prayers and collections, 
and even making the organ dis- 
course Bach and Wagner, instead 

[33] 



On Going to Church 

of Goss and Jackson. This singu- 
lar appeal to a people walking in 
darkness was quite successful : the 
mid-day hour is kept to this day; 
but Parson Shuttleworth has to 
speak for five minutes — by general 
and insistent request — as House- 
keeper, though he has placed a 
shelf of books in the church for 
those who would rather read than 
listen to him or the organ. This 
was a good thought ; for all in- 
spired books should be read either 
in church or on the eternal hills. 
St. Nicholas Cole Abbey makes 
you feel, the moment you enter it, 
that you are in a rather dingy ro- 
coco banqueting-room, built for a 

[34] 



On Going to Church 

city company. Corpulence and 
comfort are written on every stone 
of it. Considering that money is 
dirt cheap now in the city, it is 
strange that Mr. Shuttleworth can- 
not get twenty thousand pounds to 
build a real church. He would, 
soon enough, if the city knew 
what a church was. The twenty 
thousand pounds need not be 
wasted, either, on an " architect." 
I was lately walking in a polite 
suburb of Newcastle, when I saw 
a church — a new church — with, 
of all things, a detached cam- 
panile ; at sight of which I could 
not help exclaiming profanely : 
" How the deuce did you find your 

[35] 



On Going to Church 

way to Newcastle ? " So I went 
in and, after examining the place 
with much astonishment, addressed 
myself to the sexton, who hap- 
pened to be about. I asked him 
who built the church, and he gave 
me the name of Mr. Mitchell, 
who turned out, however, to be 
the pious founder — a shipbuilder 
prince, with some just notion of 
his princely function. But this 
was not what I wanted to know ; 
so I asked who was the — the 
word stuck in my throat a little — 
the architect. He, it appeared, 
was one Spence. "Was that mar- 
ble carving in the altar and that 
mosaic decoration round the chan- 

[36] 



On Going to Church 

eel part of his design ?" said I. 
"Yes," said the sexton, with a 
certain surliness as if he suspected 
me of disapproving. "The iron- 
work is good," I remarked, to 
appease him; "who did that?" 
"Mr. Spence did." "Who carved 
that wooden figure of St. George?" 
(the patron saint of the edifice). 
" Mr. Spence did." " Who painted 
those four panels in the dado with 
figures in oil ? " " Mr. Spence did : 
he meant them to be at intervals 
round the church, but we put them 
all together by mistake." "Then, 
perhaps, he designed the stained 
windows, too?" "Yes, most of 
'em." I got so irritated at this — 

[37] 



On Going to Church 

feeling that Spence was going too 
far — that I remarked sarcastically 
that no doubt Mr. Spence designed 
Mr. Mitchell's ships as well, which 
turned out to be the case as far as 
the cabins were concerned. Clearly, 
this Mr. Spence is an artist-crafts- 
man with a vengeance. Many 
people, I learnt, came to see the 
church, especially in the first eigh- 
teen months ; but some of the 
congregation thought it too orna- 
mental. (At St. Nicholas Cole 
Abbey, by the way, some of the 
parishioners objected at first to 
Mr. Shuttleworth as being too 
religious.) Now, as a matter of 
fact, this Newcastle Church of St. 

[38] 



On Going to Church 

George's is not ornamental enough. 
Under modern commercial condi- 
tions, it is impossible to get from 
the labour in the building-trade 
that artistic quality in the actual 
masonry which makes a good 
mediaeval building independent of 
applied ornament. Wherever Mr. 
Spence's artist's hand has passed 
over the interior surface, the 
church is beautiful. Why should 
his hand not pass over every inch 
of it ? It is true, the complete 
finishing of a large church of the 
right kind has hardly ever been 
carried through by one man. 
Sometimes the man has died : 
more often the money has failed. 

[39] 



On Going to Church 

But in this instance the man is 
not dead ; and surely money can- 
not fail in the most fashionable 
suburb of Newcastle. The chan- 
cel with its wonderful mosaics, 
the baptistry with its ornamented 
stones, the four painted panels of 
the dado, are only samples of 
what the whole interior should 
and might be. All that cold con- 
tract masonry must be redeemed, 
stone by stone, by the travail of 
the artist church-maker. Nobody, 
not even an average respectable 
Sabbath-keeper, will dare to say 
then that it is over-decorated, how- 
ever out of place in it he may 
feel his ugly Sunday clothes and 

[40] J 



On Going to Church 

his wife's best bonnet. Howbeit, 
this church of St. George's in New- 
castle proves my point, namely, that 
churches fit for their proper use 
can still be built by men who 
follow the craft of Orcagna instead 
of the profession of Mr. Pecksniff, 
and built cheaply, too ; for I took 
the pains to ascertain what this 
large church cost, and found that 
^30,000 was well over the mark. 
For aught I know, there may be 
dozens of such churches rising in 
the country ; for Mr. Spence's 
talent, though evidently a rare and 
delicate one, cannot be unique, 
and what he has done in his own 
style other men can do in theirs, 

[41] 



On Going to Church 

if they want to, and are given the 
means by those who can make 
money, and are capable of the same 
want. 

There is still one serious obstacle 
to the use of churches on the very 
day when most people are best 
able and most disposed to visit 
them. I mean, of course, the 
services. When I was a little boy, 
I was compelled to go to church 
on Sunday ; and though I escaped 
from that intolerable bondage be- 
fore I was ten, it prejudiced me so 
violently against churchgoing that 
twenty years elapsed before, in 
foreign lands and in pursuit of 
works of art, I became once more 

[42] 



On Going to Church 

a churchgoer. To this day, my 
flesh creeps when I recall that 
genteel suburban Irish Protestant 
church, built by Roman Catholic 
workmen who would have con- 
sidered themselves damned had 
they crossed its threshold after- 
wards. Every separate stone, every 
pane of glass, every fillet of orna- 
mental ironwork — half-dog-collar, 
half-coronet — in that building 
must have sowed a separate evil 
passion in my young heart. Yes ; 
all the vulgarity, savagery, and bad 
blood which has marred my lit- 
erary work, was certainly laid upon 
me in that house of Satan ! The 
mere nullity of the building could 

[43] 



On Going to Church 

make no positive impression on 
me ; but what could, and did, 
were the unnaturally motionless 
figures of the congregation in their 
Sunday clothes and bonnets, and 
their set faces, pale with the malig- 
nant rigidity produced by the sup- 
pression of all expression. And 
yet these people were always mov- 
ing and watching one another by 
stealth, as convicts communicate 
with one another. So was I. I 
had been told to keep my restless 
little limbs still all through those 
interminable hours; not to talk; 
and, above all, to be happy and 
holy there and glad that I was not 
a wicked little boy playing in the 

[44] 



On Going to Church 

fields instead of worshipping God. 
I hypocritically acquiesced ; but 
the state of my conscience may 
be imagined, especially as I im- 
plicitly believed that all the rest 
of the congregation were perfectly 
sincere and good. I remember at 
that time dreaming one night that 
I was dead and had gone to heaven. 
The picture of heaven which the 
efforts of the then Established 
Church of Ireland had conveyed 
to my childish imagination, was a 
waiting-room with walls of pale 
sky-coloured tabbinet, and a pew- 
like bench running all round, ex- 
cept at one corner, where there 
was a door. I was, somehow, aware 

[45] 



On Going to Church 

that God was in the next room, 
accessible through that door. I was 
seated on the bench with my ankles 
tightly interlaced to prevent my legs 
dangling, behaving myself with all 
my might before the grown-up 
people, who all belonged to the 
Sunday congregation, and were 
either sitting on the bench as if at 
church or else moving solemnly in 
and out as if there were a dead 
person in the house. A grimly- 
handsome lady who usually sat in a 
corner seat near me in church, and 
whom I believed to be thoroughly 
conversant with the arrangements 
of the Almighty, was to introduce 
me presently into the next room — 

[46] 



On Going to Church 

a moment which I was supposed 
to await with joy and enthusiasm. 
Really, of course, my heart sank 
like lead within me at the thought; 
for I felt that my feeble affectation 
of piety could not impose on Om- 
niscience, and that one glance of 
that all-searching eye would dis- 
cover that I had been allowed to 
come to heaven by mistake. Un- 
fortunately for the interest of this 
narrative, I awoke, or wandered off 
into another dream, before the 
critical moment arrived. But it 
goes far enough to show that I was 
by no means an insusceptible sub- 
ject: indeed, I am sure, from other 
early experiences of mine, that if I 
[47] 



On Going to Church 

had been turned loose in a real 
church, and allowed to wander and 
stare about, or hear noble music 
there instead of that most accursed 
Te Deum of Jackson's and a sense- 
less droning of the Old Hundredth, 
I should never have seized the op- 
portunity of a great evangelical re- 
vival, which occurred when I was 
still in my teens, to begin my lit- 
erary career with a letter to the 
Press (which was duly printed), 
announcing with inflexible materi- 
alistic logic, and to the extreme 
horror of my respectable connec- 
tions, that I was an atheist. When, 
later on, I was led to the study of 
the economic basis of the respecta- 

[48] 



On Going to Church 

bility of that and similar congrega- 
tions, I was inexpressibly relieved 
to find that it represented a mere 
passing phase of industrial confu- 
sion, and could never have sub- 
stantiated its claims to my respect 
if, as a child, I had been able to 
bring it to book. To this very day, 
whenever there is the slightest 
danger of my being mistaken for a 
votary of the blue tabbinet waiting- 
room or a supporter of that mo- 
rality in which wrong and right, base 
and noble, evil and good, really mean 
nothing more than the kitchen and 
the drawing-room, I hasten to claim 
honourable exemption, as atheist and 
socialist, from any such complicity. 

[49] 



On Going to Church 

When I at last took to church- 
going again, a kindred difficulty 
beset me, especially in Roman 
Catholic countries. In Italy, for 
instance, churches are used in such 
a way that priceless pictures become 
smeared with filthy tallow-soot, and 
have sometimes to be rescued by 
the temporal power and placed in 
national galleries. But worse than 
this are the innumerable daily ser- 
vices which disturb the truly relig- 
ious visitor. If these were decently 
and intelligently conducted by gen- 
uine mystics to whom the Mass was 
no mere rite or miracle, but a real 
communion, the celebrants might 
reasonably claim a place in the 

[50] 



On Going to Church 

church as their share of the com- 
mon human right to its use. But 
the average Italian priest, person- 
ally uncleanly, and with chronic 
catarrh of the nose and throat, pro- 
duced and maintained by sleeping 
and living in frowsy, ill-ventilated 
rooms, punctuating his gabbled 
Latin only by expectorative hawk- 
ing, and making the decent guest 
sicken and shiver every time the 
horrible splash of spitten mucus 
echoes along the vaulting from the 
marble steps of the altar: this un- 
seemly wretch should be seized and 
put out, bell, book, candle and all, 
until he learns to behave himself. 
The English tourist is often lectured 

[51] 



On Going to Church 

for his inconsiderate behaviour in 
Italian churches, for walking about 
during service, talking loudly, 
thrusting himself rudely between a 
worshipper and an altar to examine 
a painting, even for stealing chips 
of stone and scrawling his name on 
statues. But as far as the mere 
disturbance of the services is con- 
cerned, and the often very evident 
disposition of the tourist — especially 
the experienced tourist — to regard 
the priest and his congregation as 
troublesome intruders, a week spent 
in Italy will convince any unpreju- 
diced person that this is a perfectly 
reasonable attitude. I have seen 
inconsiderate British behaviour 

[52] 



On Going to Church 

often enough both in church and 
out of it. The slow-witted English- 
man who refuses to get out of the 
way of the Host, and looks at the 
bellringer going before it with 
"Where the devil are you shoving 
to?" written in every pucker of his 
free-born British brow, is a familiar 
figure to me; but I have never seen 
any stranger behave so insufferably 
as the officials of the church habitu- 
ally do. It is the sacristan who 
teaches you, when once you are 
committed to tipping him, not to 
waste your good manners on the 
kneeling worshippers who are 
snatching a moment from their 
daily round of drudgery and starva- 

[53] 



On Going to Church 

tion to be comforted by the Blessed 
Virgin or one of the saints : it is 
the officiating priest who makes 
you understand that the congrega- 
tion are past shocking by any in- 
decency that you would dream of 
committing, and that the black 
looks of the congregation are di- 
rected at the foreigner and the 
heretic only, and imply a denial of 
your right as a human being to your 
share of the use of the church. 
That right should be unflinchingly 
asserted on all proper occasions. I 
know no contrary right by which 
the great Catholic churches made 
for the world by the great church- 
builders should be monopolised by 

[54] 



On Going to Church 

any sect as against any man who 
desires to use them. My own faith 
is clear : I am a resolute Protestant ; 
I believe in the Holy Catholic 
Church; in the Holy Trinity of 
Father, Son (or Mother, Daughter) 
and Spirit; in the Communion of 
Saints, the Life to Come, the Im- 
maculate Conception, and the every- 
day reality of Godhead and the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Also, I be- 
lieve that salvation depends on re- 
demption from belief in miracles ; 
and I regard St. Athanasius as 
an irreligious fool — that is, in the 
only serious sense of the word, 
a damned fool. I pity the poor 
neurotic who can say, "Man that 

[55] ' 



•aJ« n 



On Going to Church 

is born of a woman hath but a short 
time to live, and is full of misery/ ' 
as I pity a maudlin drunkard; and 
I know that the real religion of to- 
day was made possible only by the 
materialist-physicists and atheist- 
critics, who performed for us the 
indispensable preliminary operation 
of purging us thoroughly of the 
ignorant and vicious superstitions 
which were thrust down our throats 
as religion in our helpless child- 
hood. How those who assume 
that our churches are the private 
property of their sect would think 
of this profession of faith of mine 
I need not describe. But am I, 
therefore, to be denied access to the 

[56] 



On Going to Church 

place of spiritual recreation which 
is my inheritance as much as theirs ? 
If, for example, I desire to follow 
a good old custom by pledging my 
love to my wife in the church of 
our parish, why should I be denied 
due record in the registers unless 
she submits to have a moment of 
deep feeling made ridiculous by the 
reading aloud of the naive imperti- 
nences of St. Peter, who, on the 
subject of Woman, was neither 
Catholic nor Christian, but a boorish 
Syrian fisherman. If I want to 
name a child in the church, the 
prescribed service may be more 
touched with the religious spirit — 
once or twice beautifully touched — 
[57] 



On Going to Church 

but, on the whole, it is time to dis- 
miss our prayer-book as quite rotten 
with the pessimism of the age 
which produced it. In spite of the 
stolen jewels with which it is stud- 
ded, an age of strength and faith 
and noble activity can have nothing 
to do with it: Caliban might have 
constructed such a ritual out of his 
own terror of the supernatural, and 
such fragments of the words of the 
saints as he could dimly feel some 
sort of glory in. 

My demand will now be under- 
stood without any ceremonious for- 
mulation of it. No nation, working 
at the strain we face, can live 
cleanly without public-houses in 

[58] 



On Going to Church 

which to seek refreshment and rec- 
reation, To supply that vital want 
w r e have the drinking-shop with its 
narcotic, stimulant poisons, the con- 
venticle with its brimstone-flavoured 
hot gospel, and the church. In the 
church alone can our need be truly 
met, nor even there save when we 
leave outside the door the materi- 
alisations that help us to believe the 
incredible, and the intellectualisa- 
tions that help us to think the un- 
thinkable, completing the refuse- 
heap of " isms" and creeds with our 
vain lust for truth and happiness, 
and going in without thought or 
belief or prayer or any other vanity, 
so that the soul, freed from all that 

[59] 



On Going to Church 

crushing lumber, may open all its 
avenues of life to the holy air of the 
true Catholic Church. 



[60] 



EPIGRAMS 

AND 

APHORISMS 

BY 
OSCAR WILDE 



A careful and complete compilation of 
the gems of thought and brilliant wit- 
ticisms of this author, together with 
some of his opinions on art, selected 
from "Lady Windemere's Fan," "A 
Woman of No Importance," "An Ideal 
Husband," "The Importance of being 
Earnest," The Picture of Dorian 
Gray," "The Decay of the Art of 
Lying," etc., etc. The sources from 
which these selections are made are out 
of print, and it has only been by the 
most thorough research that they have 
been collected for this volume. Attract- 
ively bound, $1.50. 

Fifty numbered copies on Japan Vel- 
lum at $5.00 each. 



MAY 16 1905, 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2009 

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